I am reading a book by General Jimmy Doolittle called, "I Could Never Be So Lucky Again". Doolittle was a helluva pilot, racer and aviation academic from pre-WWI thru post-WWII. A section on early parachuting caught my attention. It's a little long, but maybe some of you will enjoy it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- During 1921 to 1923 at McCook, we were experimenting with all types of parachutes. Many of us still didn't wear them because it was considered "sissified" to put one on. Few of us wore them until Lt. Harold R. Harris, one or the top test pilots at McCook and head of the Flight Test Section, saved his life with one on October 20, 1922. He was assigned to stress test a Loening PW-2A equipped with experimental balanced ailerons. This type of test was usually done by dogfighting with another aircraft in order to put the stresses on a plane that might be expected in combat. Manual 'chutes had been available for only about a year and many pilots erroneously thought that if they jumped in an emergency, they wouldn't have enough control of their arms to pull the ripcord. What was ironic was that Harris had almost been tempted to leave the 'chute on the ground because he had a new seat cushion fitted to it but the harness was then so tight that he couldn't buckle it easily. In disgust, he started to climb in the cockpit without it but then changed his mind and put it on. After Harris had climbed to altitude, he rendezvoused with an MB-2 flown by Lt. Muir S. Fairchild, who had to test new elevators. They started to dogfight. After several minutes of trying to get on each other's tail, Harris suddenly felt the stick vibrate so uncontrollably he couldn't hold it. One of the new ailerons had failed because of excessive fluttering and was torn off. The wing fabric began to tear away. He unbuckled his safety belt, stood up, and was plucked out of the Loening like a cork out of a bottle. He had no trouble disentangling his arms and pulling the ripcord. He landed unhurt in a grape arbor in the backyard of a home on Troy Street in Dayton. He gathered his 'chute in his arms and hiked a half mile to the test pilot office. In his report he said: "I knew it was impossible to regain control of the airplane. There was only one thing to do to save my life. I had seen a good many airplane crashes. I had helped pick up a good many pilots who had been killed. In a collapse of the sort I was experiencing, if I stayed with the airplane, I would undoubtedly have been killed. The next thing for me to do was to leave the airplane and trust my parachute." Harold Harris thus became the first man to save his life in any emergency jump through the use of a manually operated parachute. We all wore them from then on. A sign was posted in the pilots' room that read: DON'T FORGET YOUR PARACHUTE. IF YOU NEED IT AND HAVEN'T GOT IT, YOU'LL NEVER NEED IT AGAIN.
